Supporting Mentees
When you consider that mentorship goes beyond advising and is more of a long-term relationship, it’s not surprising the level of depth of some mentor/mentee relationships. Mentors often become wise older friends, confidants, and reliable parts of networks that mentees form around themselves. This comes with burden and joy. You will get in the trenches with your mentee, guide them through situations that you learned potential ways to navigate previously, and help them come out better on the other side. You see them grow and develop and succeed, but you also see them fail and struggle and make questionable choices. You are not their parent or even a relative, but in some cases, that allows you to have more of a positive impact.
When and how to support a mentee is something you must decide for yourself. We’ve discussed boundaries elsewhere, but it is of particular concern when thinking about supporting your mentee. We’ll discuss some potential areas that might come up and provide guidance in these areas. It is not an exhaustive list based on our experiences mentoring students, but hopefully gives general insight that can be applicable to other cases. Of course, we are always here to help guide and discuss situations (confidentially as long as title 9 issues aren’t involved).
Areas we will cover:
Handling mental health crises
Writing Letters of recommendation (and when you shouldn’t)
Providing career guidance
When to get help
Learning when to let the mentee have more responsibility
Handling mental health crises
One of the most challenging situations you can find yourself in while supporting a mentee is when that mentee is experiencing a mental health crisis. This could span anything from suicidal ideation to medication changes disrupting their routine. Students trust their mentors and often open up to them about very serious issues, or sometimes you find yourself noticing a change in behavior or attitude because you work closely with them.
Always remember that your mentee’s mental health is not for you to fix or solve. Just as you wouldn’t perform surgery on them if they broke a leg or write them a prescription for antibiotics if they have a bacterial infection, you should not attempt to treat or fix their mental health issues since you (presumably) do not have the training of a mental health expert. If you are a trained mental health expert, this statement does not apply to you.
You can sympathize, empathize, be understanding, and help get them to safety and/or help just as you would escort a student to student health if they cut themselves in the lab.
Vanderbilt has many great resources for helping students in distress.
Supporting Students in Distress, including what to do in an emergency and when/how to submit a Student of Concern Form
If you do find yourself in the midst of a conversation with a student about a current mental health issue, do your best to listen without judgment, be honest with them about limitations to the confidentiality you can offer (unsure whether you are a mandatory reporter, go here), ask them if they know the resources available to them and help them get to those resources either way.
We encourage you to:
Know the resources
Know your reporting requirements
Seek training to help bridge a student to safety and/or professional help
Not try to solve or fix things on your own
Take care of yourself
Supporting your mentees is not easy, particularly when mental health crises arise, but you can learn to navigate them in a way that ensures both you and the student are safe.
Writing letters of recommendation
A common request of mentees is for recommendation letters for grad or med school or to serve as a reference for job applications. If you have an overwhelmingly good impression of your mentee, this is an easy situation (though there are some subtle nuances here to recommend). It gets tricky if your mentee has been up and down and downright challenging if they have been less than stellar. We’ll give you some guidance on each scenario.
The overall amazing mentee
If you have nothing bad you COULD say about your mentee, then there’s no reason not to say ‘yes’ to a request for a letter or to serve as a reference, right? It is easy to think that, but it comes down to what’s best for the student.
If you are a grad student, and your mentee is asking for a letter of recommendation for grad or med school, that letter really should come from your lab’s PI. You are building your reputation; presumably, they have already substantiated theirs. But, a simple solution is for you to draft the letter for the PI since you likely know the mentee better. It requires the PI to be on board, of course, but it gives a stronger letter in support of the student.
If you are a post-doc or any type of faculty, you should still give thought to what’s best for the student, but you may have sufficient connections and reputation for your name to carry weight. You might also in this instance defer to your lab’s PI if their connections are stronger. Depending on the scenario, what’s best for the student may be a letter from both the PI and you. If they have few other options for letters, two from one lab may be the student’s best scenario.
If they request that you serve as a reference for a job application and you can confirm work dates and comment on the student’s performance as an “employee” (even though they aren’t really your employee), then your standing and credentials are less important.
The wishy-washy or in-the-middle mentee
No mentee is perfect (or needs to be perfect). In reality, most mentees will fall into this category, and the same guidance given above for “The overall amazing mentee” can be followed with some additions.
It’s important to focus a letter on the student’s strengths as opposed to their shortcomings. We recommend finding three strengths you can confidently say about the student and provide examples of those in the letter. While you may want to show resilience, growth or room for further growth through the letter and you certainly don’t want to fabricate anything about the student, the tone of the letter should be positive overall. If, for some reason, you struggle to identify three strengths or write in a positive tone about the student, then check out the section for the “The lots of room for improvement mentee.”
The lot of room for improvement mentee
You may enjoy your mentee tremendously as a person but still get frustrated with their approach to research. Based on the age of most college students, we can expect them to be turbulent individuals who are consistent or mature in all aspects of life. You may choose to write a letter or serve as a reference even when the mentee has been disappointing if you see their potential. If you don’t, turn down the request.
Seeing the student’s potential allows you to frame the letter as a person in their corner who sees both their strengths as weaknesses. Has your inconsistent mentee shown signs of being a better version of themselves? If so, can you identify what might have led to the sign? It is acceptable to write qualifying statements in a recommendation letter. For example, “When Garlan is able to focus solely on their research, their progress pace ramps to the level of a first year graduate student. Each summer they worked in my lab, Garlan was able to produce sufficient results to submit to a national conference. The research-focused nature of a graduate program will allow Garlan the time and environment needed for them to convert this summer mentality into a year-round one that will enable their success in research.” Think of it as though you are helping the student’s future grad or med school collect evidence of their potential for success in the future. Find those nuggets and provide the school with insight into what the student needs. If those nuggets are not there, it is your responsibility to that mentee to turn down the request. We would also recommend that long before you get to this point, if you aren’t seeing those nuggets, help your mentee adjust their goals so that future you can have those nuggets about which to write.
Hopefully, each of these ranges of mentee types gives you enough to go off of in terms of deciding whether to write a mentee a letter or serve as a reference. If you are faced with a scenario and unsure what to do, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’ve written hundreds of letters for all types of students and can provide some perspective and even examples, if needed.
Career guidance
Undergraduate mentees commonly look to their mentors for career guidance. They may look at you as a model for their own career or merely seek your insights on what they should do in life.
Figuring out the next steps in one’s career can be rather daunting. You may have experienced this yourself at one time or another. Helping someone else through this process should be entered cautiously as your mentee may actually take your advice, forever altering the trajectory of their life.
Here are a few suggestions for how to approach and engage with your mentee when it comes to career guidance.
Consider your level of expertise as a career coach
As with any request a mentee may make of you, remember that, unless you are a trained career coach or have spent numerous hours building expertise in the area, you should not sell your advice as the ultimate, definitive word on the subject.
You may have done a great deal of career exploration and much knowledge to offer to a mentee on what they can do with a particular degree or set of skills. You also may have done very little. It’s critical to be honest, both with yourself and your mentee, about the extent of advice you can provide. It’s perfectly acceptable to tell your mentee that you can only provide insights on going to grad school and entering a career as an academic researcher (or whatever your career path includes).
Additionally, you may have built sufficient expertise to guide someone else in the process of identifying and vetting potential career options. It’s amazing to be able to help someone else through something you struggled with yourself. Remember, however, that they are not you. What worked for you may not work for them.
Take away: Sharing your own experiences, regardless of your level of expertise as a career coach, is completely acceptable as long as you communicate them as such.
Double check your own bias for career paths
If you’re reading this, you are likely in some role in academia, whether a graduate student who may only be a transient academic or a full professor who’s never once thought of life outside the university. It can be easy to think that the path you took is the right path. You chose it for good reason. It can be damaging to mentees to have their mentor insist that an academic path is the ultimate and only path for anyone though. Instead of selling your mentee on the path you chose, consider their skills and interests. Do they align with a career in academic research? If so, share your observations and rationale. If not, that insight may be just as helpful for them to exclude a path.
Take away: Providing data points to young researchers (as opposed to heavy-handed guidance) allows mentees to make their own career path decisions with the impactful insights you can provide based on your own career experiences.
Open up your network
If you find yourself realizing that you have limited guidance to share around career exploration based on your own experiences (or lack thereof), you can still help your mentee considerably by opening your network to them. Perhaps in chatting with your mentee about their career interests, you realize they are curious about careers in the biotech industry and have contacts who could provide them with insights. Making the connections for your mentee can be an invaluable way for you to help them in their journey.
Take away: People in your network can provide additional perspective to your mentee that supplements the guidance you can offer.
Encourage exploration
There is no one right career path, but that platitude does not make it any easier to find a career path. As a mentor, one of the best things you can do for your mentee when it comes to career guidance is to be encouraging. Checking in with them periodically about anything they’ve learned or connections they’ve made around potential careers will help them not feel alone through the process. Making suggestions regarding seminars to attend, networking or other career-related events that are happening, or available career center resources can all contribute to helping encourage them to explore potential careers or even areas of future research.
Take away: Encouraging exploration is a great way to help a mentee identify potential career paths.
When to get help
Mentoring young researchers can be extremely fulfilling, yet it can also take a toll on you, the mentor. When you take the responsibility of mentorship seriously, you commit your energy and effort to this other person who can often make requests of you that push you to your limits on mentoring ability, knowledge, resources, and availability. It can be easy in these times to feel as though you have done your mentee a disservice, but you cannot and should not feel the pressure to be the sole mentor in the student’s life.
There will be times that arise with your mentee that leave you uncertain how to proceed. Regardless of how long you have been mentoring students, new situations may stump you.
This can happen in matters related to your research, to your mentee’s well-being, to their professional development, or to some interpersonal conflict. Whatever the circumstance, if you find yourself uncertain about how to handle a situation, you should seek help. The more sensitive the situation (i.e., those related to mental health or ethics), the more critical that you avoid attempting to deal with it on your own. Depending on the nature of the issue that arises, the help could come from one of your own mentors, your PI, your director of graduate studies, or an office within Vanderbilt that offers resources that match the situation, such as the Career Center or Center for Student Wellbeing. The experienced mentors in the SyBBURE Searle Program are also available as resources to you.
You may still be asking “When should I seek help?” Use the following criteria as a guide to identify these times.
The issue that arises is serious (i.e., deals with mental health, ethics/research misconduct, grades, safety, or respect/proper treatment of others)
You have thought about the issue for several days and do not know how to proceed
You are too close to the issue (i.e., it deals with an interpersonal issue between you and your mentee)
The same issue keeps coming up (i.e., the mentee keeps missing meetings and you have tried ten different ways to address the issue)
Realizing when you need help mentoring is critical to both you and your mentee’s growth. Learning from others and expanding your awareness of tools and resources allows you to move forward as a better mentor. Being a good mentor means putting aside any ego you may have and spending the time to improve your mentoring skills. Your growth translates to better mentorship for your student as well as a more successful mentor/mentee relationship.
Bestowing more responsibility
We all want to see our mentees grow, improve, and build skills. Each mentee’s journey or trajectory will be different, making it a challenge for you to know when to back off and give them more opportunities and responsibility. Remember the driving-a-car analogy used in the SyBBURE’s Mentoring Philosophy section? The process of going from driving the car yourself to letting the student drive the car alone may be clear, but the timing of each step needs thought and intentionality on your part.
If you reconsider that analogy, you may realize that to go from you driving and demonstrating to allowing them to drive in a controlled environment with you in the car requires you to trust them. You may be able to test their knowledge on paper before you let them get behind the wheel, but unless you spend the time to devise other intermediate steps to judge their hand-eye coordination, observation skills, and mental sharpness for quick decision-making, you have to trust them and give them room to fail.
This is no different than in the lab. You might see signs of capability and skill, but when a student hasn’t done the exact work you want them to do, you only have limited data to use to judge whether they are ready to progress. What complicates this further is that some students will rise to a big challenge (but not a lesser one) and others may be intimidated by it to the point of inaction.
So, how much responsibility do you give a student and when? The best approach is a scientific one.
Make observations about how your mentee works. Do they make task lists for themselves or do they need your help? Do they come with insights into their own problems or do they expect you to have all the answers?
Try different approaches and see how they respond. If you give them a small, tangential project, can they juggle it with their other work? If you give them a very specific question to answer versus something more vague, which do they work harder to answer?
Ask them for examples from other situations to give insights regarding the level of responsibility they need, want, or wish to have. Some students may know exactly how they work and the level of responsibility for which they are ready. Others may require you to tease the same information out from the examples a student can provide.
In a limited sense, compare to other mentees you’ve had but be cautious as no two people are the same. Do they take to work like a past student did? Maybe they will also follow a similar trajectory of growth.
Ask yourself what you have to lose. Identify what can go wrong and then proceed with this insight.
Overall, it rarely hurts to try to give your mentee more responsibility especially if you can do so on a low risk project. Trying it out on this low risk project may give you data to support allowing more responsibility on a riskier project. This is often why you see those learning to drive practicing on cars that are not the nicest—less risk. Mitigate your risks and give the student the opportunity to grow in responsibility. This is the crux of the research experience and will allow your young researcher to build confidence and determine whether research is for them.
